I just came across a website that was using a silent JavaScript miner (crypto miner) called Coinhive which was using a lot of CPU of my not so powerful device. These JavaScript mines seem to have gained popularity in recent times especially with news reports coming in that even The Pirate Bay has started using these miners (actually the same Coinhive one).

I get why websites are turning to these JS miners, to get some revenue with cryptocurrencies maybe because ads aren't performing that well. But that doesn't give them the right to use my machine as a node for their mining purposes without my consent. All they had to do was show a little popup asking my permission.

The above entry was posted on Hacker News (HN) on 14 September, 2017 by pr0gramm which operate the pr0gramm.com German imageboard. pr0gramm are the original creators of Coinhive as they have themselves told us on their webpage (have since removed this info and shifted the Coinhive website to coinhive.com from coin-hive.com). Coinhive as told by the creators originated from an experiment on the imageboard itself which itself was curiously completely opt-in and had to be run in a separate tab (miner.pr0gramm.com).

Just two days later on 15 September, 2017 it was reported that The Pirate Bay (TPB) has started using Coinhive and taking in account the time frame TPB probably got acquainted with Coinhive through the HN thread. Browser based cryptominers which were unheard of at the time got a lot of media exposure due to being used by the one of the most popular torrent sites. In no time there were multiple web based crypto miners available for anyone willing to use them even as plugins. The web mining segment is highly saturated as of now with many solutions available being used mostly on piracy and not so trustworthy websites.

I am not saying that Coinhive/pr0gramm were the first to implement browser based mining but they sure made it mainstream.

Yes I read about that. Just goes onto show their "security". Thankfully the hacker didn't do something nefarious such as spreading malware just changed the settings to get the all Monero mined for the websites for himself.

He apparently found their password from the 2014 Kickstarter data leak. I can't believe they didn't change their passwords after that.